To file or transform an electronic document properly into an official record has traditionally required an end user to decide that the document should become an official record. Following that decision, the user must then associate or file the official record in a particular records subject category within a records file plan or organization. This association is based on the meaning and understanding of the document content, relative to the meaning and understanding of the particular records subject category to which the document should be associated once it has been declared an official record. This association is significantly distinguishable enough from other potential records subject categories in the file plan to provide the user with only one choice.
Increasingly, documentation and written communications forming official corporate records and working documents originate in or are reduced to electronic form. For example, businesses that receive and exchange inquiries and conduct business by telephone and mail now, with increasing frequency, receive and exchange electronic communications and conduct business in the electronic forum including electronic mail or the capture of existing paper records into electronic form through imaging. Typically, these electronic communications, or captured documents, are organized into document and database filing systems for subsequent document or record retrieval to permit review and reproduction of the document when required at some later point in the future.
These computer readable forms of documents are stored in document collections on computer systems for easy access by the users of the computer system on which the document collections are stored. Such document collections, which are managed as official records, are unique in that they combine the official record electronic document with some very specific key data elements that adequately describe the record. The specific key data elements that describe an official record can be termed metadata and, typically, the metadata is stored in one or more databases. With each official record, there is an associated records subject category to specify the formal business rules relating to how the record should be maintained. Computer systems that provide access to such record collections include computer network based systems that permit authorized users to access the records collection and database over the enterprise or corporate network are typically termed records management systems. Where the records collection is available over an enterprise or corporate network, authorized users frequently also have the ability to obtain access to the records collection and database from a remote location. Remote location access is effected by establishing communications between the user desiring access to the data and the computer system which makes the stored records collection or database data available.
It is inherent in enterprise records systems, whether electronic or paper based, that a particular document may become lost or unavailable within the organization or corporate entity due to reorganizations and the ongoing reassignment of functions and responsibilities within the organization or corporation. Consequently, the need to reorganize document collections to reflect new organizational structures and functions and to ensure that documents can be made available for future retrieval has resulted in increasing reliance on automated systems which can adapt to the volume of documents or records maintained by an organization. One approach is to formulate a file plan as part of an electronic record keeping system or ERS. In ERS systems, a file plan specifies the framework for maintaining the organizational documents and electronic records and determines how long the records are maintained.
Under a file plan, organizational documents and document collections in the ERS are assigned attributes to meet organizational and legal requirements. For example, one of the attributes is a retention time specifying how long particular types of records are to be maintained. In a file plan, documents are frequently classified according to the functional unit of the organizational structure to which they relate. For example, human resources related records include such documents as those that provide employee and job applicant information. Unsolicited résumés, job performance evaluations and the like are the types of documents that will be maintained by a human resources department. Similarly, documents, which relate to the design and production of services or goods offered by the organization, are kept by the appropriate organizational unit responsible for the specific functions of the operational unit of the organization.
Even with an ERS file plan, there is risk that important documents will be lost for reasons other than the disappearance of the document itself A document may become misplaced in the enterprise filing system or miss-classified. Such miss-classified documents present a liability to an organization because the appropriate records management rules to meet organizational and legal requirements will not be accurately applied to the documents. Also, with increasing frequency, important documents originate in a wider variety of different forms beyond traditional sources within an enterprise. For example, paper based mail systems, facsimile correspondence, electronic mail and electronic data exchange all can form sources of important corporate or enterprise records. Naturally, the selection or mix of record sources will vary with each different organizational unit within the enterprise. Consequently, electronic forms of documents or records occur with increasing frequency within an enterprise organization. This trend, coupled with increasing diversity in the sources of records and changing systems and departmental requirements, makes maintaining a file plan or a current and reliable classification system for electronic records keeping systems increasingly vital.
In the past, automated document classification systems have been proposed but which do not provide a boundary between what can be classified reliably by a machine and what required human intervention and review. For example U.S. Pat. No. 5,463,773 to Sakakibara et al provides a document classifying system that is based on a recursive keyword selection algorithm that is used to build a document classification tree. The system of Sakakibara builds a classification tree which may or may not relate to the functional organizational units of an enterprise which has established systems and pre-existing classification categories for existing documents into which like documents created in the future are to be classified or filed. Automated classification tree structure creation and maintenance is not beneficial to an enterprise, which seeks to classify large volumes of documents, such as received e-mail, into existing enterprise classifications for record handling and storage.
Other prior art document classification systems and methods include those described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,199 to Chen and U.S. Pat. No. 5,251,131 to Masand, which develops a set of document classification rules based on a training set. In Masand, probability weighting is used to classify natural language. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,399, Kohavi teaches the production of a numeric discrimination or purity factor to discriminate between relevant and non-relevant records. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,044,375 to Shmueli, a neural network is used to extract metadata from computer readable documents.